Monuments to Franco

Workers in the process of taking away a statue of Franco in Madrid in 2005.

“Last month, Spain passed a law that says quite a lot about Europe in the new century,” Michael Kimmelman writes from Madrid. “The Parliament, fulfilling a campaign promise in 2004 by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s or who suffered as a political consequence of Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime should get full cooperation from the state, and at the same time that every province in the country must remove remaining monuments to Franco.”

“Unearth the past — and erase it,” Michael Kimmelman continues. “Never mind that over the years most of these monuments have already been carted off, making the law largely toothless and symbolic. Victors build monuments to remember the dead, and tear down the statues of the tyrants who killed them, but mostly in vain. Statues and memorials inscribe history, which each generation rewrites to suit itself.”